Session C1: Centennial of the Nuclear Atom

Rutherford's Nuclear Model

Rutherford's nuclear model originally was a theory of scattering that represented both the incoming alpha particles and their targets as point charges. The assumption that the apha particle, which Rutherford knew to be a doubly ionized helium atom, was a bare nucleus, and the associated assumption that the electronic structure of the atom played no significant role in large-angle scattering, had immediate and profound consequences well beyond the special problem for which Rutherford introduced them. The group around him in Manchester in 1911/12, which included Niels Bohr, Charles Darwin, Georg von Hevesy, and Henry Moseley, worked out some of these consequences. Their elucidation of radioactivity, isotopy, atomic number, and quantization marked an epoch in microphysics. Rutherford's nuclear model was exemplary not only for its fertility and picturability, but also for its radical simplicity. The lecturer will not undertake to answer the baffling question why such simple models work.   

Modeling and Reality in Early Twentieth-Century Physics

Towards the end of 1913, Arnold Sommerfeld, Professor of theoretical physics at Munich University, sent a letter of congratulations to a young Niels Bohr. The Dane's now-classic trilogy of papers, which coupled Rutherford's conception of the atom with a ``planetary'' configuration of electrons, had just appeared. Sommerfeld saw the calculation of the Rydberg constant as a singular triumph and immediately spotted an opportunity to try to explain the Zeeman effect. Yet he also sounded a note of caution, confessing that he remained ``somewhat skeptical'' of atomic models in general. In this, of course, he was hardly alone. Bohr's atom was a particularly egregious example of a peculiar model, one requiring what even its creator considered ``horrid assumptions.'' Nonetheless, success bred conviction. Expanding upon Bohr's original ideas, Sommerfeld soon produced the so-called ``Bohr-Sommerfeld quantization conditions,'' using them to calculate a myriad of results. Experimental evidence, Sommerfeld argued in 1915, showed that quantised electron-paths ``correspond exactly to reality'' and possess ``real existence.'' This kind of realism would not, of course, last long. In 1925, Werner Heisenberg (earlier a student of Sommerfeld's) made scepticism about the details of the Bohr model into a methodological dictum, one later enshrined in the ``Copenhagen interpretation'' of quantum mechanics. This paper uses Sommerfeld's work from the turn of the twentieth century to the mid-1920s as a window onto a landscape involving multiple contestations over the legitimacy of atomic modelling. The surprise that greeted Heisenberg's and others' phenomenological insistences, we will see, can only be understood with reference to what should be considered a ``realist interlude'' in the history of twentieth century atomic physics, one inspired by the astonishing successes of Rutherford's and Bohr's imaginings.   

Rutherford's Legacy in Particle Physics

Rutherford's legacy of employing scattering experiments to probe structure has been crucial to advancing our understanding of sub-atomic physics. This talk will describe the role of inelastic electron and neutrino scattering in uncovering the quark sub-structures of the proton and neutron.